In 1980 Gow was posted to Rheindahlen in Germany as Commander-in-Chief British Army of the Rhine and Commander Northag, the Northern Army Group of Nato. He was keen on exercises and used to say that if he kicked a BAOR football it whizzed off the toe of his boot — but if he kicked a Nato ball his toe sank in and he was lucky if it moved at all. On one occasion his Nato HQ was located in barracks occupied by a battalion of Footguards. He overheard his sergeant-major asking the RSM to make sure that the guardsmen did not laugh at the Nato soldiers because they looked well below standard in comparison. This was at a time when the Dutch soldiers were allowed to grow their hair so long that they had difficulty putting their hats on. James Michael Gow was born in Sheffield on June 3 1924. He did not come from a military family; his forebears were artists, musicians and academics . His father died when Michael was a child, and he was brought up in the household of his maternal grandfather. He was educated at Winchester and enlisted in the Scots Guards in 1942.
There were two young men ahead of him when he went to the recruiting office in New Scotland Yard; the first was a peer, the second an earl. “Don’t tell me,” the sergeant said to Gow when it came to his turn. “You must be Jesus Christ.” On his first morning in the Guards Depot, Caterham, the recruit standing at the next basin tried to commit suicide with a cut-throat razor. Another abiding memory was being told by the drill sergeant that he looked like a bag of manure tied up with pink string. Gow attended a wartime Royal Armoured Corps OCTU at Sandhurst. Physical fitness was much prized, and he had his nose broken three times in the boxing ring. After being commissioned into the Scots Guards, in July 1944 he landed in Normandy with the 3rd (Tank) Battalion. He was wounded in Belgium in October and evacuated to England, rejoining the battalion in April 1945 and taking over the duties of quartermaster. After the end of the war he served with the Control Commission in Berlin.
In 1946 he took his future wife to the Guards Boat Club Ball at Maidenhead with the intention of softening her up for a proposal of marriage. He had planned everything with great care and took her to a punt which he had placed by the jetty in advance. As he cast off, he failed to detect a number of his brother officers who were hidden in the shrubbery and who had removed the bung. The punt rapidly filled to the gunwales, and it was only with great difficulty that they regained the bank. Gow’s intended spent the rest of the ball crouched over a brazier in a cloud of steam, drying off. His wife served with the Royal Navy and was a Leading Wren at the end of the war. She and Gow married so young that they had to wait several years before the Army acknowledged their marital status. It was difficult to make ends meet, and they seriously considered moonlighting by hiring themselves out as a cook and butler; Gow even got to the point of visiting Moss Bros to reserve a yellow and black striped waistcoat and a swallowtail coat with large gold buttons.
In 1949 Gow went to Malaya as a company commander with the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards on antiterrorist operations during the Emergency. A spell as equerry to the Duke of Gloucester was followed by Staff College and then appointments first as brigade major and subsequently regimental adjutant before he returned to the Staff College as an instructor. Gow commanded the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards in Kenya in 1964 shortly after a mutiny by soldiers of the former King’s African Rifles. After a move to HQ London District as GSO1, he commanded 4th Guards Brigade. In 1970 Gow attended the Imperial Defence College, then went to HQ BAOR as Brigadier General Staff (Intelligence). He was GOC 4th Division BAOR for two years before becoming Director of Army Training. Impatient with Whitehall bureaucracy, and never happy to be tied to a desk, he spent the majority of the working week looking at training at home or overseas. In 1979 he was appointed GOC Scotland and Governor of Edinburgh Castle. After his tour as C-in-C BAOR, his final appointment was that of Commandant, Royal College of Defence Studies.
On his retirement in 1986, with the exception of two very early predecessors, he was the longest-serving member of the Scots Guards since the regiment was raised in 1642. Gow was ADC General to the Queen from 1981 to 1984. He was Colonel Commandant Intelligence Corps from 1973 to 1986 and of the Scottish Division in 1979-80. He was Brigadier, Queen’s Bodyguard for Scotland, Royal Company of Archers, and president of the Royal British Legion for Scotland from 1986. Michael Gow was a man who believed that soldiering should be fun. But while he had an easy-going style, he accepted nothing less than the highest standards. In retirement in Edinburgh, he enjoyed sailing, music, travel and reading. He published articles in military and historical journals and was a keen letter writer to The Daily Telegraph. He was appointed KCB in 1979 and GCB in 1983. Gow published Trooping the Colour: a History of the Sovereign’s Birthday Parade by the Household Troops (1989); Jottings in a General’s Notebook (1989);
and General Reflections (1991). He married, in 1946, Jane Emily Scott, with whom he had a son and four daughters. General Sir Michael Gow, born June 3 1924, died March 26 2013Fifty years ago, at the dawn of the cultural revolution of the 60s, there had never been so many ex-soldiers and ex-sailors in British history. Mods and peaceniks were reacting against generations that had been mobilised during two world wars. Yet the militarisation of British society was not just the outcome of war. Under the National Service Act, introduced in 1947, healthy males aged 18 or over were obliged to serve in the armed forces for 18 months. After the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, the length of service was raised to two years – more onerous than elsewhere in Europe. In practice national service was a catch-all for men born between 1927 and 1939 whose childhoods had already been overcast by economic depression, wartime bombing and evacuation. Although its abolition was announced in 1957, it continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not demobbed until 1963.
Every fortnight some 6,000 youths were conscripted, with a total of 2,301,000 called up over this period. The army took 1,132,872 and the RAF much of the rest, leaving relatively few sailors. After discharge, conscripts remained on the reserve force for another four years, and were liable to recall in the event of an emergency. Many drilled men became conformist and respectful of authority, but others reacted to their experiences with a lifetime of insubordination and resentment. National service did not cause the upheaval or leave the distressed aftermath of the US draft in the Vietnam war, but the significance of the forgotten militarisation of mid-20th century Britain is enduring. In an era when it was hard to recruit enough regular soldiers to meet Britain's commitments in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, conscripts trained to police regions occupied by the British after the war, to provide a reserve of troops who could be called up in any future major conflict, and they were available for immediate deployment, notably in the decolonisation wars in Malaya
, Kenya and Cyprus. Most of them were not yet old enough to vote (voting age was only lowered from 21 to 18 in 1970) and felt disempowered. They had scant pay, and provided a cut-price way for Britain to maintain its illusory great power status. But withdrawing this number of fit youngsters from the economy at a time of labour shortage harmed British post-war reconstruction. Vinen admits that he could write a whole chapter on a Conservative MP's claim that he was offered a commission because an officer spotted that he was circumcised and concluded that he must be a public school boy. In turn, a reviewer could write a monograph on Vinen's book, which is chock-a-block with important themes, provocative ideas, arresting stories, heartbreak and good jokes. Nowadays we commemorate the launch of the National Health Service as promoting a historically unprecedented mentality whereby a benign state provided its citizens with social benefits rather than treating them as subjects serving the needs of the nation.
The National Service Act was the negative counterpart of the NHS, whereby civilians were dragooned into compliance with the demands of the state. Its chief proponent was Field Marshal Montgomery, the posturing bully who was in a permanent panic of denial about his repressed homosexuality, and hoped to use military service to mould national character towards chaste combative virility. For many conscripts their sense of the state was not the benign NHS but the bullying of national service square-bashing. Generally, though, national service was not intended as an instrument of social discipline. It was disliked not only by antimilitarists and leftwingers, but by middle-of-the-road people because it disrupted the lives of their sons in a period when there was full employment for the working classes. Welsh chapel-going traditions were hostile to conscription. Working-class Scotsmen fought army discipline. As Vinen writes, "Sometimes the single word that aroused most terror in the War Office was 'Glasgow'."
Regular army officers resented national service, especially during its early years, because the need to train a constantly renewed stream of conscripts was dull, repetitive and diminished "real soldiering". The Church of England, unlike the nonconformists and the Catholics, encouraged its clergy to undertake national service. Anglicanism and "manly morality" were promoted together by the military authorities. An army guide of 1947 declared, "the sexual appetite was implanted in man for the lawful use in Wedlock". Yet Christian morality had minimal influence on the sex lives of conscripts. Rather, says Vinen, national servicemen, as opposed to regular soldiers, believed in "that greatest of all postwar virtues: deferred gratification". His findings support Claire Langhamer's wonderful study The English in Love (2013) in showing how strongly young men of the 1950s were romantics who believed in love at first sight, idealised virginity and had sweet dreams of domestic bliss within the institution of marriage.
The discomfort and violence of military life, the lack of privacy and the mindless rules imposed without consent produced a generation that cherished intimacy and non-confrontation. Most conscripts came from families where defiance of the law was inconceivable. Yet the armed forces gave innumerable opportunities for non-commissioned officers and clerks to exploit conscripts, pilfer stores and make dodgy deals. Many conscripts learned how to duck and dive, to break rules and subvert authority. One RAF clerk issued instructions that officers must count the number of flies stuck to flypapers at all bases. Such experiences chipped away at the law-abiding, respectful traditions of Britain before peacetime conscription. Vinen depicts "the hellish chaos of basic training": its violence, verbal savagery, the dumb misery of military drills, the horrors of bayonet practice. Several young men killed themselves during training – usually by hanging from a lavatory cistern, because "the shithouse" was the only place that gave a moment's privacy – but suicide statistics seem to have been doctored by officials.
Sergeants with booming voices and curling moustaches were fabled figures, but it was corporals who gave the orders in training – many were malevolent, sadistic figures. Vinen gives numerous instances of cruelty, both in training and in combat. These include the massacre in 1948 by a Scots Guards patrol – mainly national servicemen – of 24 Chinese labourers on a Malaysian rubber plantation, killings and mutilations in Kenya and a rampage by troops in Cyprus after two British servicemen's wives were shot. A serviceman described: "wholesale rape and looting and murder", including "a 13 year old girl raped and killed in a cage". National Service may prove to be the most original social history book of 2014. It is written with cool, elegant lucidity and there are neither ideological tricks nor obscure jargon. The book is bigger than its ostensible subject, embracing class, masculinity, sexuality, compliance, rebellion, combat atrocities, petty crime, notions of national identity, group solidarity, the fallibility of memory and what it means to be a man.